Having brought happiness to her native village, she now wanted to make the whole world happy and asked, begged, and urged everyone to accept for their salvation the gift of the gods, the wonderful mixture of which she alone knew the secret.

I read that story over Adela's arm and was struck by a sudden overwhelming thought. This was The Book, its last pages, the unofficial supplement, the tradesmen's entrance full of refuse and trash! Fragments of rainbow suddenly danced on the wallpaper. I snatched the sheaf of paper out of Adela's hands, and in a faltering voice I breathed:

"Where did you find this book?"

"You silly boy," she answered shrugging her shoulders. "It has been lying here all the time; we tear a few pages from it every day and take them to the butcher's for packing meat or your father's lunch ..."

IV

I rushed to my room. Deeply perturbed, with burning cheeks I began to turn the pages of the old Book with trembling fingers. Alas, not many remained. Not a single page of the real text, nothing but advertisements and personal announcements. Immediately following the prophecies of the long-haired Sibyl was a page devoted to a miraculous nostrum for all illnesses and infirmities. Elsa—the Liquid with a Swan—was a balm that worked wonders. The page was full of authenticated, touching testimonials from people who had experienced its effects.

The enthusiastic convalescents from Transylvania, Slavonia, and Bucovina hurried to bear witness and to relate their stories in warm and moving words. They came bandaged and bent, shaking their now superfluous crutches, tearing plasters from their eyes and bandages from their sores.

Beyond these processions of cripples one imagined distant, mournful villages under skies white as paper, hardened by the prose of daily drudgery. They were villages forgotten in the depth of time, peopled by creatures chained forever to their tiny destinies. A cobbler was a total cobbler: he smelled of hide; he had a small and haggard face, pale myopic eyes, and a colorless, sniffing moustache; he felt a cobbler through and through. And when their abscesses did not worry them and their bones did not creak, when dropsy did not force them onto their pallets, these people plunged into a lifeless, gray happiness, smoking cheap, yellow imperial-and-royal tobacco or dully daydreaming in front of kiosks where lottery tickets were sold.

Cats crossed their paths, both from the left and from the right; they dreamed of black dogs, and their palms frequently itched. Once in a while, they wrote a letter copied from a letter-writing manual, carefully stuck a stamp on the envelope, and entrusted it reluctantly to a letter box, which they then struck with their fists, as if to wake it up. And afterward they dreamed of white pigeons that carried letters in their beaks before disappearing in the clouds.

The pages that followed rose over the sphere of daily affairs into the region of pure poetry.

There were harmoniums, zithers, and harps, once played by consorts of angels; now, thanks to the progress of industry, they were accessible at popular prices to ordinary people—to all God-fearing people for their suitable entertainment and for the gladdening of their hearts.

There were barrel organs, real miracles of technology, full of flutes, stops, and pipes, trilling sweetly like nests of sobbing nightingales: priceless treasures for crippled veterans, a source of lucrative income for the disabled, and generally indispensable in every musical family. One imagined these barrel organs, beautifully painted, carried on the backs of little gray old men, whose indistinct faces, corroded by life, seemed covered by cobwebs—faces with watery, immobile eyes slowly leaking away, emaciated faces as discolored and innocent as the cracked and weathered bark of trees, and now like bark smelling only of rain and sky.

These old men had long forgotten their names and identities, and, lost in themselves, their feet encased in enormous heavy boots, they shuffled on bent knees with small, even steps along a straight monotonous line, disregarding the winding and tortuous paths of others who passed them by.

On white, sunless mornings, mornings stale with cold and steeped in the daily business of life, they would disentangle themselves imperceptibly from the crowd and stand the barrel organ on a trestle at street corners, under the yellow smudge of a sky cut by lines of telegraph wires. As people hurried aimlessly with their collars upturned, they would begin their tune—not from the start but from where it had stopped the day before—and play "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. . . ." while from the chimneys above, white plumes of steam would billow. And—strange thing—that tune, hardly begun, fell at once into its place at that hour and in that landscape as if it had belonged by right to that dreamlike inward-looking day. The thoughts and gray cares of the people hurrying past kept time with the tune.



And when, after a time, the tune ended in a long expansive whizz ripped from the insides of the barrel organ, which now started on something quite else, the thoughts and cares stopped for a moment, like in a dance, to change step, and then at once turned in the opposite direction in time to a new tune now emerging from the pipes of the barrel organ: "'Margarelta, treasure of my soul. . . ."

And in the dull indifference of that morning nobody noticed that the sense of the world had completely changed, that it now ran in time not with "Daisy, Daisy ..." but with "Mar-ga-ret-ta ..."

I turned another page. . . . What might this be? A spring downpour? No, it was the chirping of birds, which landed like gray shot on open umbrellas, for here I was offered real German canaries from the Harz mountains, cageloads of goldfinches and starlings, basketfuls of winged talkers and singers.